their are many people who think of queen as only a great singles band, but never were able to make a consistently great album. obviously i disagree and it drives me crazy when i read reviews and articles stating this. even a queen book i have, the writer said, queen had numerous great singles but average albums on a whole. has anyone else read such trash? obviously they know very little about queen. does anyone here agree with that statement, are queen only a great singles band?

Queen are always more recognized just for their singles and never for the complete albums, but I think that a lot of the times, the more unknown tracks are better than the ones that became famous. They were more than capable of creating strong, solid albums but just had a habit of the singles completely overshadowing anything else.

I'd say Queen were an albums band in the 1970's but from 'The Game' onwards were more of a singles band - this could be because of the way the music business altered and it became the norm for about 4 singles to be released off an album or it could be that they focused more on writing 'singles' as opposed to 'songs' for a while.

queen as only a great singles band, but never were able to make a consistently great album.

HA! What a joke. Many of the best Queen songs are NOT singles (Great king rat, My fairy king, Ogre battle, The fairy feller's master-stroke, March of the black queen, In the lap of the gods...revisited, Death on two legs, The prophet's song, You take my breath away, White man, My melancholy blues...)

queen as only a great singles band, but never were able to make a consistently great album.

HA! What a joke. Many of the best Queen songs are NOT singles (Great king rat, My fairy king, Ogre battle, The fairy feller's master-stroke, March of the black queen, In the lap of the gods...revisited, Death on two legs, The prophet's song, You take my breath away, White man, My melancholy blues...)

That's absolutely true. In fact, I very rarely listen to the GH albums anymore because there's so much better to be had on the other albums - like much of Queen II, The Prophet's Song, Melancholy Blues etc. People who claim it's a singles band either don't listen to the albums properly or completely miss the point of most of it.

Yes, I think the key to this is that in the 80s they started thinking more commercially or more mainstream in their writing. I think this might have been mainly Freddie's influence. He had a hand in Radio Ga Ga and AKOM in terms of making them more pop orientated and was probably a factor in them being big hits (bigger than they might have been).

So I think it's right what someone said about them being an album band in the 70s and singles band in the 80s.

Although, I think their albums still sold really well - they're still said to be second only to the Beatles aren't they? Don't know if that's UK or world though?

If you look at the singles, they tended to be nearly all top 40, but remember they've only really had 3 true number one singles (in the UK). And the trend I think was that the first single would do really well (because, I think, the general public would be expecting something of a new Queen release) and then successive singles dropped off a bit. This is definitely true of Miracle and I think Innuendo, although of course Fred's death changed that.

So I'm not convinced that they were a true singles band, or that they had weak albums. I think overall in their career they simply wrote a great variety of great music. And we're the lucky ones 'cause know 'em all!!!

even though queen never had the huge hit like thriller, listen to 'anato' and the music is light years ahead of that average pop of jackson. any 70's queen album really should be mentioned with the greats, especially the first 6 albums, by the way, i think mr. jackson is grossly overated. i just don't like the man or his style.

i heard they were, like Rainmustfall says, an album band - thats why they didnt have as many number 1 singles - people might be lying to me though :(. albums are very much becoming the focal point in music rather than singles in the UK, i thought Queen sort of inciated that focus. i'm probably wrong though!

"Minds are like parachutes, they only function when they are open" - Sir James Dewar

Queen had several very good albums. But never real hit albums like The Who's Tommy, Pink Floyd's The Wall or Michael Jackson's thriller. I think they should have tried to make a concept album, like the wall or tommy, and even a film of it.

I always thought Queen II sorta almost seemed like a concept album (though dont ask me what the concept is)......side 2 in particular.....(Side Black, right?)

People who think of Queen as a singles band aren't fans, they're casual listeners. I was out with some friends on Saturday and one of the guys who really likes music said the Stones are the greatest band of all time, way better than the Beatles. When I mentioned Queen, he commented on Freddie's sexuality, and said he always found them to be "a novelty act." That's appalingly ignorant, but we're hardcore fans, he's the average guy on the street. If you knew Queen from their biggest singles (Bo Rhap, AOBTD and CLTCL), it would be easy to see how the novelty act would apply, because if you only heard those songs on the radio, you'd think, opera, funk, rockabilly, they're the Weird Al Yankovic of pop music.

I think that their focus changed considerably after the success of Bohemian Rhapsody and then agan after the break in '83.

Up until '75 / '76, Queen's music was based around their album output and single success was seen as a bit of a bonus. Interviews and comments from the band at the time tend to lean towards discussion of the albums as opposed to how they saw the singles faring on the charts. From that point onwards, they then started to release more singles from each of the albums until the break in '83.

The Works featured single releases that led to EVERY song from the album being released on a version of a 7 / 12" single. From that point on, chart success was all that appeared to concern the band with multiple single releases from AKOM, Innuendo, Miracle and MIH.